RE “Come Again, Glenn?”

Interesting letter on the very legitimacy of weapons inspections, from Mr. Daniel Larison: Mr. O'Neill makes an excellent point. Though I must admit that I myself sometimes became caught up in what Blix said or didn't say as some kind of evidence in the argument over the war itself, the regime of weapons inspections in concert with the regular bombing of Iraq during the 1990s was always morally indefensible and senseless as a matter of policy. Such a regime presupposed that one nation alone was punishable for such proliferation, and that this nation could have no legitimate security claims for the development of unconventional weapons. I submit that if Israel had been so singled out, the outrage in America at the hostility to a single country would have been overwhelming. Yet this singling out of a single country for a "crime" committed by half a dozen, if not many more, states was Iraq policy since 1991. Supposedly, because Iraq was once an aggressor, its rights were null and void in perpetuity, but one imagines that such a standard, if taken universally, might make Israel's life rather difficult in light of the campaigns 1967 and certainly that of 1982. [i]As one of those "extreme right-wing state sovereigntists," as I was once called, I considered the total violation of Iraqi sovereignty by these inspections and the violence used to back them up to be immeasurably worse in principle than anything imposed on the Germans by the Carthaginian peace of 1919. The Germans were certainly among the first to start that war, and yet their territory was never violated so completely or their rights dismissed so summarily as was the case with Iraq. The U.N., and France for that matter, naturally had no interest in the sovereignty of Iraq for all those years--the globalists in the U.N. and in Europe place no value on it, as we saw in Kosovo. The integrity of Iraq only became a rallying cry when it was Mr. Bush who proposed to brutally violate it; Clinton violated it with the same impunity, though never to the same extent, but for properly globalist reasons. That does not make French opposition to the war wrong in itself, but it should also be kept in mind, lest we imagine that they have started believing in the rights of nations once more. Even Mr. Ritter, who has done so much good in undermining the technical claims of the jingoes at considerable personal cost from smears directed against him, seems to have worked on the assumption that if Iraq actually possessed such a weapons arsenal that war would be justified; his point was consistently that they didn't have very much left, not that it would be wrong to invade even if they had them. The assumptions that make such a conclusion possible certainly cannot possibly take into account the rights of a state of Iraq to seek to develop its own security policy, but it follows that if America has such a right to take independent action for national security then so has every other state. In response to the Suez campaign, both President Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles--the latter not being especially famous for his respect of the integrity of foreign nations--insisted that if international law, such as the U.N. Charter in which state sovereignty is protected, was to be binding, then it must be binding upon all. Mr. Bush and his band of madmen propose that most nations have no rights and that international law is binding only on those nations. Needless to say, most of the same people who have viscerally supported Mr. Bush in this war would never tolerate such foreign interference in the setting of our own security policy--it is precisely because the U.N. seemed to be requiring that our national security be approved by other countries that this desire for noninterference at "home" could be so effectively translated into mindless support for interference abroad. Naturally, most Democrats, firmly believing that the U.N. is supreme, could never take a strong, universal defense of state sovereignty, because they respect such sovereignty nowhere in the world, least of all here. This will always be their philosophical weakness, and it may be one of the few things that will work to save Mr. Bush's political career. Incidentally, a comparable violation of sovereignty, though never realised in its original form, demanded by the globocrats was the Clinton demand made at Rambouillet in 1999 that Yugoslavia give NATO the run of its territory. For refusing to be turned into a punching bag for foreign interventionists, Yugoslavia was duly punished by a unified front of unprincipled globalists across Europe and the U.S., and indeed continues to be punished by the indefensible occupation of a considerable section of its territory. In the end, though, measured compliance, such as Iraq did give in fits and starts, brought it to a sorrier end than the initial defiance by Belgrade. I suspect that this lesson may not be lost on the folks in North Korea.[/i]